Our Opinion: It's electric

Zero-emission buses get a charging station

You know the feeling. On a beautiful Tallahassee day, you're driving through the city with your windows down when you pull up next to a city bus.

Suddenly, you're reaching for the up button as fumes and the roar of a diesel engine invade your little sanctuary.

Well, in the coming months you might be lucky enough to be sitting next to one of StarMetro's new all-electric, zero-emission buses. If you are, that experience will be quite different.

At 10 a.m. Tuesday at the C.K. Steele Plaza, on Tennessee Street just a block west of Monroe Street, the city of Tallahassee will showcase a new fast-fill charging station that will allow an electric bus to recharge its batteries in less than 10 minutes. If you see one of the buses cruising silently by, you may well be looking at the future.

StarMetro, the city's transit system, won a $5 million grant in 2010 from the Federal Transit Administration to begin work on a system of all-electric buses. With the money, the city signed a contract with Proterra Inc. of Greenville, S.C., for three buses and a charging station. Then, with an extra $2 million from the FTA, StarMetro bought two more buses last year.

With the fast-fill station now in operation, StarMetro is ready to put its five electric buses into full operation, probably by August.

StarMetro brags that it will have the largest fleet of all-electric, fast-charging buses on the East Coast. Obviously, five buses does not a transit system make. But this is new technology, and the FTA and other local transit systems will be watching Tallahassee to see how cost-effective and durable the new buses are.

Certainly, all-electric buses offer a big advantage in noise and air pollution over traditional buses. There also are expected savings: When StarMetro first got the grant, its director estimated that, to operate a bus over a 12-year period, it would cost about $600,000 in diesel fuel versus about $90,000 in electricity.

The new buses and charging station fit with Tallahassee's interest in conservation. StarMetro also has placed solar-powered trash receptacles/compactors at some bus stops. As with the new buses, they are expected to offer savings in fuel and maintenance.

Tallahasseeans should be proud of these innovations.

Now let's get those five buses on the road and see what technology can do for us in the 21st century.